Islam is the real positive change that you need to change for being a better person or a perfect human being, you can change yourself if you read QURAN, IF YOU DO THAT !! you will change this UMMAH, say I am not A Sunni or Shia, BUT I am just a MUSLIM. Be a walking QURAN among human-being AND GUIDE THEM TO THE RIGHT PATH.

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Saturday, September 5, 2015

Thomas Friedman: Saudis add to Mideast's instability

timesunion

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published 5:49 pm, Thursday, September 3, 2015

The Washington Post
ran a story last week about 200 retired generals and admirals who sent a
letter to Congress "urging lawmakers to reject the Iran nuclear
agreement, which they say threatens national security." There are
legitimate arguments for and against this deal, but there was one
argument expressed in this story that was so dangerously wrongheaded
about the real threats to the United States from the Middle East, it
needs to be called out.
That argument was from Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, the retired former vice commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe,
who said of the nuclear accord: "What I don't like about this is, the
No. 1 leading radical Islamic group in the world is the Iranians. They
are purveyors of radical Islam throughout the region and throughout the
world. And we are going to enable them to get nuclear weapons."
Sorry,
general, but the title greatest "purveyors of radical Islam" does not
belong to the Iranians. Not even close. That belongs to our putative
ally Saudi Arabia.
When it comes to Iran's involvement in terrorism, I have no illusions: I covered firsthand the 1983 suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, both believed to be the handiwork of Iran's cat's paw, Hezbollah.
Iran's terrorism, though — vis-a-vis the U.S. — has always been of the
geopolitical variety: war by other means to push the U.S. out of the
region so Iran can dominate it, not us.
I support the Iran nuclear
deal because it reduces the chances of Iran building a bomb for 15
years and creates the possibility that Iran's radical religious regime
can be moderated through more integration with the world.
But if
you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you
must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from
Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and
modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the
billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the
1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni
and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical,
anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist
brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.
It
is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic
State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent the Islamic State donations.
It is because all these Sunni jihadi groups — Islamic State, al-Qaida, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrassas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.
And
we, America, have never called them on that — because we're addicted to
their oil, and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.
Consider this July 16, 2014, story in The New York Times
from Beirut: "For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil
dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly
practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda. But a trove of
thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in
surprising detail how the government's goal in recent years was not just
to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a
priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran."
Or consider this Dec 5, 2010, report on BBC.com: "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
warned last year in a leaked classified memo that donors in Saudi
Arabia were the 'most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist
groups worldwide.' She said it was 'an ongoing challenge' to persuade
Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority. The
groups funded include al-Qaida, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, she added."
Saudi
Arabia has been a U.S. ally on many issues and there are moderates
there who detest its religious authorities. But the fact remains that
Saudi Arabia's export of Wahhabi puritanical Islam has been one of the
worst things to happen to Muslim and Arab pluralism in the last century.
Iran's
nuclear ambition is a real threat; it needs to be corralled. But don't
buy into the nonsense that it's the only source of instability in this
region.Thomas L. Friedman writes for The New York Times.

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